The Keys to the Kingdom
by lionesseyes13
Summary: When Aslan tells Peter and Susan they won't be returning to Narnia, they must comfort and confront one another. Set during the book version of Prince Caspian. No incest.


The Keys to the Kingdom

Peter strode through the sun-dappled path through the woods surrounding the Ford of Beruna. Verdant canopies of oaks and elms stretched like open arms above his head, the dirt crunched beneath his shoes, and the morning wind blowing through the trees whipped crimson into his cheeks. He was alone in the forest, but he was at peace, because he finally knew that he was on the path Aslan had appointed for him—the path that Aslan, last night, hard told him to walk down this morning, the fifth day after Miraz's defeat.

After a few moments of walking, he heard the sound of soft, muffled sobs, and he hurried down the pathway toward the cries. Stepping into a clearing, he saw Susan hunched on a mossy rock, her shoulders heaving as she blew her nose in her handkerchief and tears streaked in salty rivulets down her cheeks.

"Su," he said, hurrying over to her and clapping her gently on the back. "Don't cry."

"Don't tell me not to cry, Peter," she muttered, managing to glare at him through red-rimmed eyes. "It's perfectly reasonable for me to cry when my whole life has been ruined and everything I thought I believed in has turned out to be a pretty lie, a malicious prank, or an unfunny joke carried on far too long."

"I don't know what you're talking about, Su." Shaking his head, Peter wrapped an arm around her trembling shoulders and wondered if Aslan had told him to walk down this path this morning because the Lion had foreseen that Susan would need comforting here and expected Peter to be the one to offer her solace. After all, Aslan would probably be the first to point out that even Susan the Gentle needed consoling sometimes. "I don't like seeing you in tears, but I can't help you if I don't know what's wrong."

"You'll know what's wrong soon enough." Susan's hands clenched around her handkerchief until her knuckles shone like alabaster. "Then you won't tell me to stop crying."

Peter opened his mouth to assure his sister that nothing could be as bad as she thought and that together they could handle any problem that confronted their family or Narnia, but, before a word could leave his lips, he spotted Aslan, who had appeared more soundlessly than a Mouse scout, standing in the middle of another pathway that fed into the glade.

"Peter." Aslan's voice was the controlled, commanding rumble that Peter could never imagine disobeying. "Come. Walk with me, Son of Adam."

"Here." Peter pulled out the handkerchief buried in his pocket and placed it on his sister's lap. "Dry your eyes, and we'll fix everything that is bothering you once I've met with Aslan."

Then, before Susan could answer, he crossed the clearing, and continued down the path with Aslan on his right. As soon as they were out of Susan's earshot, he parted his lips to ask Aslan what was troubling her, but Aslan replied to his question before Peter could pose it.

"Your sister is crying because she—and you—won't be returning to Narnia again in this lifetime." Aslan's eyes, stern and uncompromising but somehow not unsympathetic, pierced into Peter. "It will be a tremendous burden for both of you that you will need to carry together, and a great sorrow that must be alleviated through consoling each other."

"Aslan, please don't make us leave Narnia and you forever," Peter burst out through his suddenly dry mouth. Blinking his eyes, because all the moisture that had departed his mouth had welled in his eyeballs, he thought that he finally comprehended the soul-crushing despair that must have torn through Adam and Eve when they were expelled from Eden. Ever since he had arrived in Narnia, he had been called a Son of Adam, but he had never felt the weight of that title until now when, like Adam, he was to be kicked out of paradise for his defiance and disbelief. "Susan and I were blind not to see you when you appeared to us, and deaf not to listen to Lucy when she said she saw your face, but we will listen and look for you better in the future. Don't turn away from us. I was so lost and miserable when I couldn't see your face. I can't imagine not being able to look upon it again."

"Peter Pevensie, High King of Narnia." Shaking his mane, Aslan growled lowly in his throat. "Haven't the last few days taught you that it is creatures who turn away from me, not I who turn away from them? Haven't the last few days shown you that I am with you even when your stubbornness and pride prevent you from seeing me? Don't you understand that I never abandon my creatures though they may desert me?"

"Don't be mad at me, please, Aslan." His stomach knotting, Peter fiddled with his sword hilt, thinking that, like the weapon, he was useless when not wielded by the proper hands—or paws. "I want to do your will, but I'm not as wise as you, and I don't always know what you wise for me to do. I get so confused sometimes, but I'm trying to do what's right."

"Seek my face, and you will find me. Listen to those who see me, and you will hear my voice." Aslan's gaze locked on Peter, and, perhaps to removed some of the sting from his earlier reprimand, the Lion purred, "Take some comfort in the knowledge that never before and never again in Narnia will a generation seek my face and listen to my voice as earnestly as they did when you were High King in Cair Paravel. I chose you to lead my people, Peter, and I will not abandon you or them. I always keep my promises, but, to assure you that I will not forget my word, I offer you this."

Aslan breathed, flooding Peter with a warmth and hope more powerful than a hearth's on a blizzard night, and filling Peter's hands with a golden set of keys that felt hot and light rather than cold and heavy.

"These are the keys to my kingdom, Peter," Aslan explained, as Peter stared down at the keys in his hand. "In the end, I will tell you when to use them, and what you bind with them will be bound in the high heavens."

"But I thought I wasn't coming back to Narnia?" His forehead furrowing, Peter frowned.

"You aren't." Aslan's mane twitched. "Certainly not in this lifetime, but that doesn't mean that I'm done with you. I knew you before you were born, and, before Narnia and your universe were, I was and always will be, because I am the great I am. I am the Lion and the Lamb. I am Savior. I am Redeemer. I am Healer. I am Lord of Lords. I am King of Kings. I am Maker of all and above all. I have many names and forms in the different universes, but I always am. I exist in your universe if you look for me, and I even have a Peter in your universe, too, so you can find me easily. Now, go serve my creatures, High King."

"I'll do what I can to bind my sister and me to you, Aslan." Understanding that Aslan meant for him to go comfort the weeping Susan, Peter bowed and pivoted to head back to the glade where his sister was crying.

"Nothing would make me happier, Son of Adam," rumbled Aslan, as Peter, his mind swimming with images of crosses, stone tables, lions, and lambs, wended his way back down the path.

"Aslan told you, didn't he?" demanded Susan, swiping tears away from her cheeks with Peter's handkerchief as he arrived and settled down on a mossy rock beside her. "I can't believe he is just kicking us out of Narnia like this. How can he abandon me like this when it was Lucy and me who accompanied him on his way to the Stone Table and who stayed with him until he rose from the dead?"

"Aslan doesn't abandon us, Su," Peter insisted. "It is us who abandon and doubt him."

"Why shouldn't we doubt him when he makes us suffer like this?" snapped Susan, hurling her brother's now damp handkerchief into his lap. "How can I keep my faith in him when I've been told that I won't see his face again and no memory can erase the pain of this final rejection?"

"It isn't rejection," Peter argued. "It's a chance to know him in another way, and if we look for him and listen for him, we will always see his face and hear his voice."

"Just shut up, Peter," snarled Susan, her usually beautiful and pleasant face scarlet, stained with tears, and twisted with an agonized rage. "Don't lie to yourself or to me any longer. Fairy tales with happy endings and fantasy worlds with talking lions don't exist, or, if they do, we don't belong in them. We belong in the real world in England. We wear school uniforms, not robes of state. We carry bookbags, not weapons. We study history, instead of making it. We need to accept that, and help Lu and Ed do the same before they endure the pain we have."

"Su—" Peter began, but she cut across him furiously.

"Be quiet if you don't have anything logical to say." Susan stamped her foot, as if to grind her memories of Narnia and Aslan into the dirt she desperately wanted to regard as ordinary.

"I love you, Su," Peter said, because that was all he could think to say, even if it wasn't logical, and he folded her hand in his.

"I love you, too, Peter," Susan whispered, squeezing his fingers as if she were a drowning sailor clinging to a rock in the midst of a turbulent sea. "It's good to know that we have each other no matter what."

"We have Aslan, too," Peter insisted.

"Apparently, we only have one brain—mine—between us." Yanking her hand free of his grasp, Susan rolled her eyes. Her tone tarter than Peter had ever heard it, she added, "Come on. We don't want to be late for the ceremony where Aslan will find the perfect moment to send us away from Narnia forever."

Shooting his sister a sidelong glance, Peter commented, "You must know who Aslan is, so you must realize that the consequences of being so bitter toward him could be eternal. You're practical. You must understand how foolish it is to risk your eternal happiness for a temporary temper tantrum."

"We won't be with Aslan ever again," countered Susan acerbically, as they started down the path toward the place where Aslan would address the Telmarines who did not wish to remain in Narnia on equal footing with talking animals. "Anyway, when we've come back to Narnia, and felt the terrible grief of learning that Mr. Trumnus, Mr. Beaver, Mrs. Beaver, and all the animals we knew and loved during our first adventure here have died, why should we want eternal life? Why should we want to go on existing when everyone we love has become dust?"

"I think you're missing the point." Peter's jaw clenched, and he wondered if he was already failing Aslan by losing his patience when he should have been comforting Susan, and not explaining things as well as he should have. "The point is that you spend eternity with those you love, including Aslan, so you aren't separated from them at all, and none of you are suffering any longer."

"Always assuming, of course, that everybody you love wants eternal life, and that a certain talking lion won't kick them out of paradise on a whim," responded Susan gaily, elbowing him lightly in the chest as if they were going on a picnic in the woods on a gorgeous day.

"Aslan's decisions are always a lot more than whims," Peter snapped, because she could insult him all she wanted, but he wasn't going to allow her to go on mocking Aslan. Wishing that this spat was nothing more than one of their regular arguments over how to best take care of the younger siblings they both saw themselves as responsible for, he finished tersely, "When Ed and Lu must be told that Aslan has said that you and I won't be returning to Narnia, I'll do all the talking, and you can remain silent unless you have something nice or respectful to say about Aslan."

"Very well." Flipping back her long black hair, Susan lifted her nose in the air. "I suppose you can also be the one that Lu and Ed come crying to once they understand that the fairy tales you told them to believe are all nonsense."

Before Peter, who had opened his mouth to retort that Aslan was not nonsense, Susan went on cheerily, "I'll just tell Ed and Lu that we can find the clothes we need to change into before departing in the clearing we just left." Her eyes gleaming with triumph and pain, she observed, "Aslan didn't explain to you that our clothes were in the glade, brought down in bundles this morning, and you were too oblivious to see them folded on the rock behind me. You'd have us showing up on the platform of a train station looking like circus clowns. We'd be dragged off to a loony bin, and what would the doctors there make of our Narnia stories?"

"Oh, we wouldn't be lugged off to a loony bin. We'd just be marked down when we arrived at school for not following the dress code." Peter smiled, remembering that Susan was the first sibling he had been able to share jokes and secrets with, and that it had been she whom he had spent hours conferring in whispers to about Lucy's possible insanity when she had discovered the wardrobe as a portal to Narnia. "We'd be told to take off our ridiculous outfits and replace them with our school uniforms at once, as if our school uniforms weren't ridiculous themselves. Maybe we'd even receive a few demerits, and become the most popular students for a couple of hours for managing to get into trouble only minutes into the start of term."

"Well, even though we can agree on little else right now, at least we both know that our school uniforms are ridiculous," Susan remarked, her lips quirking as they stepped out of the forest and into the noon sun.


End file.
